


A Million Shadows [1/10]

by balthesar



Series: A Million Shadows [1]
Category: Torchwood
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-02
Updated: 2011-09-02
Packaged: 2017-10-23 08:48:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/248451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/balthesar/pseuds/balthesar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The entire world ran backwards, Ianto reflected, completely backwards from the way a reasonable world should work.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Million Shadows [1/10]

**Author's Note:**

> "A Million Shadows" is a chaptered fic I wrote during the hiatus between s1 and s2 of Torchwood in 2007. It's an AU rewrite of most of the first season, but was plausibly based on s1 canon.
> 
> While it's technically a WIP, I seriously doubt I'd go back and finish it, partly because of everything that's happened in TW since s2. There's a lot more left to the story I planned to tell, and while archiving it, I realized how much I'd also want to go back and correct or rewrite in the finished chapters.

The entire world ran backwards, Ianto reflected, collecting last night's pizza boxes into a black trash bag. Completely backwards from the way a reasonable world should work.

For example, Ianto liked his job. It wasn't usually difficult, just time-consuming; when he wasn't literally at the Hub, he felt like he might as well be. By necessity, the team worked a lot at night -- fewer witnesses to the bolder aliens -- so he spent many wee hours of the morning driving the company SUV through roadblocks in Cardiff or on crap country roads, or pouring medicinal scotch after a rough encounter, or catching up on the football matches that he taped off the telly. Ianto slept poorly since moving back to Wales anyway, so he spent most of his days up too, throwing out empty take-away Chinese boxes and picking up his dry-cleaning and sitting behind the counter at the front of the house, handing out brochures to the few tourists who stumbled in.

He found his job surprisingly satisfying: that had surprised him initially. The glorified butler position was a step down, careerwise; he'd only been with Torchwood a few years, but he was already the Assistant to the Assistant Director of the computer analysis division and his record was spotless. Residentially, Cardiff was a step down from London, where he'd had a cosy third-floor flat in Earl's Court and a pretty girlfriend and a group of lads that he went to the pub with. Now he was back where he'd started, in a flat larger than his London one but with dodgier plumbing, a few blocks away from his mum's house so he could keep an eye on her.

Such a bloody backwards world, he decided, slinging the bag into the skip behind the 'Historic Cardiff Walking Tours' office. It was drizzling, the sky paling blue as the sun rose.

Ianto was young, well-educated, reasonably intelligent. He'd managed to leave Wales five years ago, and now he was back again, only half a mile from where he'd grown up. No girlfriend now -- Lisa had been one of the 467 known casualties when the Cybermen had tried to convert the Torchwood London staff, and Ianto, through what he could only describe as incontinent-making terror and cowardice, had ranked among the 27 survivors. No lads to drink at the pub with -- in the eight months he'd been in Cardiff, no one on the team had invited him, and he hadn't mentioned it. Sometimes he had a drink with Jack, when everyone else had gone home and Jack wasn't holed up in his bunker-bedroom, but they didn't really talk and Ianto didn't make a big thing of it.

He'd taken the job to get the hell away from London anyway. Jack had hired him, Ianto could only assume, based on the appearance of his arse in a suit, because Jack hadn't run anything approaching a background check or asked for references or even seen his bloody resume. Ianto had just showed up at the office after looking it up in the company directory, flashed his employee badge and said he was willing to do whatever was needed.

'Whatever was needed' happened to be scraping pterodactyl shit off the railings, making coffee and doing Jack's laundry. Ianto hadn't expected to like it, but the meticulousness and precision it required, constantly juggling tasks, and even the periodic monotony of the work was pleasing.

Plus -- and this was the part that the world ran most obviously backwards during -- if he did his job well, no one noticed. It was completely insane. If he kept the Hub tidy, anticipated every coffee refill, made sure the SUV had petrol and kept the keys to secure storage away from Owen, no one said a word. It was only when he slipped up or forgot something that anyone noticed. Gwen would look apologetic when she mentioned the mistake; Owen would make some tasteless joke or just be needlessly rude. Jack tended to either be dismissive or give him strangely searching glances when he thought Ianto wasn't looking. Suzie had barely registered his presence -- she had always been more interested in whatever gadget she was investigating. Toshiko was the only one who didn't embellish her requests.

Prep school and university and London had made him competent, though, and Ianto had managed to work himself into near invisibility. That was strange and backwards too, Ianto thought, straightening the racks of Millennium Centre adverts in the panelled front office. Nobody noticed him -- which was ideal -- but everything in the Hub had his mark upon it, even Myfanwy, who was named for a song he used to perform with his choir. Ianto had latched onto a phrase from some poem one of his exes had read to him -- something about being the air in his lungs, unnoticed and necessary.

That was Ianto Jones, now. Unnoticed and necessary.

For being technically secret special-ops agents, no one at Torchwood really managed to keep anything secret, at least among themselves. Ianto wasn't a gossip, but he watched the rest of them, even as they didn't notice him. He knew their likes and dislikes, who was shagging whom and what they were going to do on the weekend. Jack took his coffee plain and strong and liked his trousers pressed with a crease. Toshiko distinctly preferred black pens to blue and liked lemon chicken, but not almond. Owen liked Marmite on brown toast when they had to meet in the early morning and never remembered to put petrol in the Range Rover. Gwen liked steak and onion crisps, sugar in her tea but no milk, and met a bloke named Bruce shortly before she went out with Rhys; Owen maintains that Gwen settled. Ianto noticed the copy of _OK!_ peeking out of Toshiko's handbag and the novelty buttons on Owen's labcoat ("I'm a mess" seemed particularly appropriate). He noticed the old photos of Jack -- they _were_ of Jack, and not his father or grandfather, Ianto was certain -- and he knew that Rhys sent leftovers to work with Gwen for lunch every day. She didn't think anyone saw, but when she didn't end up eating them, she'd quietly scrape out the Tupperware into the food bin for Myfanwy.

On the other hand, they didn't really know anything important about Ianto; they didn't even know many trivial things. They didn't know about his half-decade in London or the sort of people he fancied or what sort of beer he drank at the pub or why he spent two evenings a week at his mum's or the pit in his stomach where Torchwood One and Lisa used to be or why he was content to waste a university degree and a budding career on cleaning up other people's shit in Cardiff.


End file.
